“Serge Willoughby just wanted to make money and have fun. He didn’t mean to start World War Three.” So begins A Capital Calamity, the rollicking debut novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Fred Kaplan. It’s no surprise that Kaplan—longtime “War Stories” columnist for Slate and author of six acclaimed, narrative-driven non-fiction books—has now composed a novel.

It tells the tale of Serge Willoughby, a top-rank defense consultant—intellectual abettor of the military-industrial complex—who plays both sides of the street to double his fees (for instance, making the case for a new bomber in a study paid by the Air Force, then making the case against a new bomber in a study paid by the Navy), and whose games-playing triggers a cataclysmic crisis. Now, along with the CIA director (who’s also a bitter ex-girlfriend), a former school chum who’s now an NSA hacker, a garrulous Wall Street tycoon-turned-secretary of defense, and a vivacious investigative journalist (who may or may not be flirting with him for a big story), Willoughby must now save the world, even though he has built a career and a lifestyle on avoiding commitment to any political cause or purpose. A Capital Calamity is a funny, trenchant, and deeply moral novel, probing the tensions between cynicism and principle, war and peace.

Fred Kaplan, the “War Stories” columnist for Slate and a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Boston Globe, is the author of six books and many articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, and other publications. His books include The Wizards of Armageddon, Daydream Believers, 1959: The Year Everything Changed, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, and The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War. Kaplan has had fellowships or residencies with New America, the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Academy in Berlin, and the London School of Economics, and is an elected member of the Society of American Historians. He earned a B.A. from Oberlin College and (like his novel’s protagonist) a Ph.D. from M.I.T. (Unlike his protagonist, he has never been a consultant.) He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Brooke Gladstone.

plus-circle Add Review

comment

Reviews